"I think it is ridiculous," said one man, who didn't want to give his name.

Police responded to a home on the 4500 block of Jamaica in Southeast Memphis on Wednesday evening. According to investigators, a man with a gun shot at his girlfriend, then shot out the windows to his SUV.

Witnesses say someone could have been hit by one of those bullets.

"I could have been shot, his girlfriend could have been shot, just for simply being outside and calling 9-1-1," the man said.

Witnesses say the police left the scene around 1 a.m. after failing to make contact with the suspect. Family members didn't have any luck either.

On Thursday morning, a family member checking on the suspect found him dead inside his house. Police say the man died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

"After four hours a man has obviously come outside and fired a gun, drunk, he smashed out window instead of going in after him, and preventing what has happened, they just left," the man said.

"The decision was made based on what we knew at that time," Memphis Police Director Toney Armstrong said.

Armstrong said these situations are often judgment calls, with officers factoring in a number of things.

"We didn't feel like it was necessary for our officers to make entry to a residence where at that particular time he didn't pose any significant threat to our officers of any residents," Armstrong said. "In the past you had seen us maker entry this one just did not rise to that level."

"It is certainly not our desire to put anybody at risk, if we felt that it rose to that level, certainly there is no way in the world we would have left," he added.

Back on Jamaica, neighbors still struggled to come to grips with what happened.